Brisbane's Green Corridors: Parks, Gardens, and Riverside Walks

Brisbane's park network, organised along the Brisbane River's meanders and connecting the inner suburbs through the riverside greenways, the neighbourhood parks, and the established botanical gardens, provides the urban green infrastructure that a subtropical city with excellent outdoor conditions for most of the year requires for the health and social wellbeing of its population. The network's quality, significantly enhanced by the investment that successive Brisbane City Councils have made in waterfront activation, park facilities, and the cycling and walking path connections that link the parks, creates the outdoor lifestyle infrastructure that Brisbane's reputation as an outdoor city rests upon.

New Farm Park, occupying the river peninsula that gives New Farm its characteristic shape and providing the rose gardens, the cricket pitches, the river views, and the shade trees that make it one of the finest inner-city parks in Australia, serves as the primary outdoor gathering space for Brisbane's most densely populated inner suburb. The park's Saturday morning farmer's market, the weekly cycling and running community that uses its perimeter paths, and the families who use the barbecue and playground facilities on weekend afternoons create the daily and weekly rhythms of park use that define New Farm's community life.

The Roma Street Parkland, the formal garden parkland immediately behind the Roma Street railway station in the CBD, provides the accessible green space that the city centre and its working population require for the midday walk, the outdoor lunch, and the post-work recreational activity that a park of its quality and central location enables. The parkland's mixture of the formal garden design, the event lawn, and the more naturalistic plantings of the tropical and subtropical species creates the variety of park environment that sustains daily use across the different activities that park visitors pursue.

The Botanic Gardens in the CBD and the Mount Coot-tha Botanic Garden provide the complementary botanical resources that the city's plant lovers and the casual visitor to green space both use. The City Botanic Gardens' riverside location and the heritage of the early colonial plantings provide the mature garden character that the Mount Coot-tha gardens, larger and more recently developed, supplement with the greater diversity of the collection that the larger site accommodates.

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